The book was, apparently, in its original binding of thin plates of wood, covered with leather, but without any gilding, ornamented only by crossed divisions marked with a heated iron. Papillon says that the engravings were cut in a crude, experimental manner, and that they appear to have been printed by rubbing the palm of the hand or a frotton many times over the paper. The tint of the ink was a pale, faded blue, mixed as water color. The field of the engravings was badly routed out; projections that soiled the paper appeared in several places, obscuring words, which had subsequently been written on the margin. Neither the engravings, nor the memoir bound with them, furnish us with dates; but there can be no doubt as to the period in which the engravings were ostensibly made, for Pope Honorius occupied the papal chair only between April 2, 1285, and April 3, 1287. There is nothing improbable in the statement that prints like these could have been made in 1285. There may be a substratum of truth under the exaggerations raised by family pride and a love for the marvelous; but the memoir of the lives of the two Cunios, and the details furnished by Papillon about the appearance of the engravings, are altogether unsatisfactory.{1} Whatever opinion may be formed of the credibility [p131] of the story of the two Cunios,[56] it must be admitted that their prints had no known influence in the development of engraving on wood. They were not imitated. The interval between the years 1285 and 1440 is almost an absolute blank in the annals of Italian engraving: it furnishes us neither trace nor tradition of engravings on wood. The oldest authentic Italian engravings on wood are in _The Meditations of John of Turrecremata_, a book printed at Rome in 1467; but these engravings cannot be claimed as illustrations of the development of the Italian practice of the art, for they were designed and cut by or for Ulric Hahn, a German printer. This silence of the early chroniclers should not be construed as evidence that there was no engraving on wood; it is evidence only of the trivial nature of the work done. To specify the work is to justify the neglect. It consisted, so far as we know, only of stamps for the use of notaries, autographs for those who did not write, trade-marks for merchants’ packages, outlined initials for inexpert scribes, and engraved blocks for manufacturers of textile fabrics. This paltry work seems specially inappropriate for the initiation of a great art destined to make a revolution in literature.